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On DVD

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo

PLUGGED IN RATING

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Movie Review

Six years after his first R-rated misadventures corrupted the big screen, Deuce Bigalow is back. Since that time, Deuce's wife has been eaten by a shark (her prosthetic leg is all that remains, and Deuce takes it everywhere he goes). He's traded his self-described "man-whore" ways for being a fish enthusiast. But when his old pimp, T.J. Hicks, invites him to sample Amsterdam's libertine pleasures, things begin to go awry.

It's not long before T.J. and Deuce learn that someone is systematically murdering male prostitutes in Amsterdam. But when the pair offers to help the fraternity-like brotherhood of the Royal Order of European Man-Whores solve this mystery, they're roundly rejected. Then Deuce's ineptitude accidentally implicates T.J. as the killer, and T.J. is forced into hiding (wearing ridiculous disguises).

To solve the crime and prove to a determined police detective, Gaspar Voorsboch, that his friend is innocent, Deuce begins contacting the long list of women who last solicited the services of the deceased male prostitutes. Along the way, he falls for the detective's niece, a beautiful girl named Eva who suffers from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Eva's behaviors are almost as strange as the women Deuce must visit to stop Amsterdam's man-whore murderer.

Positive Elements

Despite the film's title, Deuce Bigalow actually has no interest in being a male prostitute. When a child accuses him of still following that profession, he says, "I'm not a man-whore. ... I stopped man-whoring when I met my wife."

Deuce doesn't have sex with the women he meets as he looks for clues; instead, he goes out with them and tries to help them. Without exception, these women have physical abnormalities or deformities that have left them ostracized from society. Deuce accepts them, tries to minimize their problems and helps them to have some dignity. In the end, he tells a crowd of people at the annual Man-Whore Awards that what a woman really wants is for a man to ask her how she's feeling and how her day was, and then to listen to her. Gigolos, he says, are just ripping women off.

When T.J. is about to go to jail, he asks Deuce to tell T.J.'s mother how sorry he is for how his life turned out.

Spiritual Content

T.J. wears a shirt with the word "Mecca" on it. After being released from a jail full of men with not-so-kind intentions, he says, "Thank You, Jesus."

Sexual Content

While the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system is sometimes not very helpful, occasionally its descriptions of objectionable content hit the nail right on the head. This is one of those cases. Among other things, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo earned its R-rating for "pervasive strong crude and sexual humor." The opening camera shot shows the bare backside of a male prostitute hurrying to put his pants on before his client's husband returns home. She tells him, "Thanks for last night"—words that are then repeated by the maid and the male security guard. That scene puts us on notice that hetero- and homosexual humor is all fair game. Obviously, the film has no qualms about exploiting both—with gusto.

Constant slang references to male and female genitalia (including an especially vulgar term) bombard viewers. One of the mildest such moments is when a man is introduced to Deuce as "the gigolo with the most below." Most of the rest of these references—at least 50 by my count—are simply too graphic to print. Other dialogue between characters refers to oral sex, homosexual sex and even bestiality.

Two scenes show a female weathercaster on TV taking her shirt and bra off as she does her job. Four prostitutes in lingerie are seen dancing in store-front windows in the red-light district of Amsterdam. Another buxom young woman wearing a wet T-shirt with no bra presses her chest against a window as she cleans it—leaving little to the imagination. Deuce ends up on the set of a porn movie where men are lined up to have sex with a woman who's shown in lingerie. Eva tries to tempt Deuce into bed wearing only a skimpy bra and panties. A scene at Man-Whore University includes a very brief glimpse of the side of a woman's breast. Two of the women Deuce meets with go to a plastic surgeon for breast enlargement (no nudity). Twice we see men in G-strings.

One of the women Deuce visits who desperately wants a child forces him to wear a diaper and bonnet, then asks him to perform a sexual act (which, thankfully, doesn't happen). After eating a marijuana-laced brownie, Deuce hallucinates and imagines a woman in a painting inviting him to bite her chest, which he does (no nudity). He comes out of his trance to find that he's actually biting T.J.'s chest.

Throughout the film, T.J. insists that he's not gay. Still, he continually ends up in bizarre, disgusting sexual situations with dead male prostitutes. In the end, he decides to become a pimp for gay male prostitutes.

Violent Content

There's a surprising amount of violence, most of which is played as slapstick humor. A dolphin bites an elderly man in the crotch and an older woman rides a dolphin that rams into a buoy. A midget head-butts Deuce in the crotch. Several characters are tossed (unharmed) through glass windows. Deuce has a flashback to his wife being killed by a shark; they're in the ocean together in a scene that recalls the movie Open Water when she's pulled under. Deuce carries her prosthetic leg on an airplane, where it smacks five people in the face as he walks down the aisle. A woman who announces she "loves President Bush" is hit with a brick in the head and flips into a canal. To prove that a particular prostitute is indeed dead, Deuce and T.J. take turns dropping a remote control, a cuckoo clock and a bowling ball on the corpse's head.

Male prostitutes are murdered in different ways, including one whose Ferrari is pushed into the path of an oncoming train and another who is locked inside a tanning bed that fries him. A man Deuce has dinner with chokes to death because Deuce thinks his panicked gesticulations are a description of oral sex.

The most gratuitously violent scene is arguable when a cat attacks T.J. as he's going to the bathroom, affixing himself to the man's crotch. T.J. flails around the room, then begins slamming the door on the cat to get him to let go.

A car chase ends with a mild accident, and Eva crashes her scooter. Gaspar threatens Deuce with a gun, and later the two spar with swords. Deuce accidentally sets off a large explosion.

Crude or Profane Language

Profanity flows freely in this sequel, including about half-a-dozen incidences of the s-word and at least four uses of the f-word (once sexually). God's name is misused four times, each in combination with "d--n." Other vulgarities ("f-gg-t," "d--k," "p---," etc.) are spoken a handful of times. Two terms are so crude I won't even bleep them here. Almost two dozen other mild profanities top off this foul flick.

Drug and Alcohol Content

A long scene in one of Amsterdam's infamous "coffee houses," where some mind-altering drugs are legal, shows patrons smoking marijuana and hashish. T.J. is rolling a joint when a police officer comes over to light it for him. This scene portrays Holland as an "enlightened" place where even the cops will help you get high. Deuce gives the prosthetic leg of his dead wife to an elderly Dutch woman who's missing one of hers. Instead of using it to walk, however, she turns it into a giant marijuana bong. Police tell a man unloading a truckload of marijuana bales that he'll have to move because it's a "No Marijuana Unloading Zone." Several scenes depict characters drinking wine (or possibly hard liquor) and smoking.

Other Negative Elements

T.J. spills some french fries in a toilet, then eats them. Eva's obsessive-compulsive disorder is extremely exaggerated for supposedly humorous effect. Deuce eats dinner with a woman who has a hole in her throat, presumably due to cancer. When she drinks wine, it squirts Deuce in the face. Smoking a cigarette yields a similar result. One of the male prostitutes says in a TV interview that his mother suggested his career. Two men are shown urinating in the street, and another defecates on the sidewalk.

Conclusion

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo feels like a Saturday Night Live skit run amok. Freed from the decency constraints of broadcast television, SNL alum Rob Schneider (who co-wrote) hasn't missed a single opportunity to go for cheap laughs using stale, sick sex gags. (One of the "man-whores" is named Assapopoulos Mariolis, for example.) But the depth of story line—if it's even worthy of such a term—is barely deep enough to sustain 10 minutes, let alone 83.

As the film started, I braced myself for a barrage of offensive material—and it rained down just as I expected. After about the fifth genital-related joke, it left the arena of the offensive and crossed over into the land of the mind-numbing. For me, the overall effect of so much sexualized humor was not outrage (though that would be warranted) as much as sheer boredom. When every line of dialogue is working this hard to shock you, it has exactly the opposite effect. That's not a good thing, especially for teens, who are in the process of developing their sexual opinions and moral beliefs. (I won't even begin to examine the dangers associated with a culture being trained to yawn its way through an hour-and-a-half of deviant sexual content.)

Ultimately, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo mocks and degrades human sexuality from start to finish. God's design for sex between a man and a woman in marriage is a thing of breathtaking beauty and wonder. In contrast, it's hard for me to think of a movie I've seen recently that reduces sexuality to something so ugly. Schneider's vision of the world seems confined to what he sees when he looks up from the bottom of the toilet bowl. And despite his leading character's sermonette urging men to listen to women instead of treating them as sex objects, nothing can redeem the sheer badness—any way you want to evaluate it—of this movie.

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